Discovering the Art of Level Design Through #Blocktober
Since 2017, Level Designers worldwide have participated in a yearly tradition of sharing footage of their work-in-progress levels, often contrasting it to the final version, during the entire month of October.
Those early designs are called blockouts — and thus #blocktober was born!
A conversation with Miles Tost, our Lead Level Designer who worked on Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty, sparked the idea to participate as a studio and the cross-team project kicked off in the summer of 2024.
The goal of this project can be split into three main pillars:
- Promoting the work of our talented Level Designers.
- Presenting our community with a transparent look behind the game development curtain.
- Highlighting the great levels players can discover when diving into our most-recent release, Phantom Liberty.
As usual with these cross-team projects, many people contributed to the full version that you see in its full glory on social media. Shout out to our Copywriters who helped our Level Designers put their thoughts to digital paper, and our Illustrators who created the final graphical assets from the initial screenshots, which were polished by the Screenshot team.
The five weekly posts each covered one specific area or level of Phantom Liberty. Two images from the blockout stage of a level were contrasted side by side with two images from the same perspective taken from the final game.
Accompanying each post, Level Designers provided quotes with insightful comments into the blockout and creation process, offering you a chance to learn more about how the memorable environments of Phantom Liberty came to be!
